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Court exhibits catch Zuckerberg ranking teen safety below the metaverse
In 2021 Mark Zuckerberg told a stranger on WhatsApp that adolescent safety would not be his personal main focus while he was building the metaverse. That message is now a litigation exhibit, and so is the ranking inside it.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- In 2021, as a whistleblower alleged that Facebook was harming children, Zuckerberg answered with a note to staff that he reposted publicly, saying most people at the company did not recognise the picture being painted.
- Exhibits released in a series of lawsuits include a private WhatsApp conversation in which an unidentified reader pressed Zuckerberg to make adolescent safety personally his own issue.
- In that thread Zuckerberg said he cared deeply and would keep Meta industry-leading with young people, but would not call teen safety his personal main focus while he was more focused on building the metaverse.
- Weeks after the exchange, Zuckerberg announced the company was renaming itself Meta in honor of the priority he had named in the message.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure A chief executive's WhatsApp thread with someone outside the company came back as a court exhibit. Every product lead's private ranking of safety against roadmap work is discoverable the same way.
- decision Teams that are about to under-resource a safety workstream now choose between recording the decision with its reasons in one document and leaving it scattered across chat replies that read as dismissal when quoted back.
- constraint Public statements of care are now checkable against the private ranking made in the same weeks. That narrows how far trust-and-safety messaging can run ahead of what was actually staffed.
- contradiction The Verge's account of this particular exhibit is about attention and messaging, so anyone arguing that Meta acted while staring at its own research has to rest that case on other material in the dockets.
His correspondent wanted one thing, and asked for it in lower case. "i am not saying facebook is duplicitous and evil," they wrote, "i am saying the opposite, you have heard the chorus and will PERSONALLY make this issue over adolescents your issue." [4] Zuckerberg said "I personally care about this." [6] Then he asked how the request fit the plan: "How do you think this fits with our focus on promoting building the metaverse as the next major opportunity?" [7] He added that the metaverse push was "not at odds with safety, but it's a much different and more innovation-focused message." [8] In public that same season, he had told staff in a note he reposted himself that "It's difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives." [2]
The Verge's account of this exhibit describes a conversation about messaging and personal attention, and it does not describe internal Meta research being put in front of him in that exchange. [14] The thing that surfaced in discovery was a reply about what the chief executive was spending his own time on. [3]
The priority he named in that reply has its own accounting. Reality Labs has accumulated more than $80 billion in operating losses in the nearly five years since the rename. [10] That is roughly $16 billion a year. [15] This year Meta cut about 10 percent of the division, shuttered three VR studios and discontinued the metaverse for work. [11]
Muse, the "personal AI agent" Meta shipped in early September, is the next one of these. [12] Apptopia estimates it has more than 600,000 daily active users in the US and that it reached the top of the iOS App Store charts. [13] A daily-active count from launch weeks tells you how many people opened an app after seeing it everywhere. It does not tell you how many are still opening it next month, and Apptopia's estimate is a snapshot. [13]
For the person who has to roll out a teen-facing surface on Monday, this comes down to two questions per written artifact: whether the sentence ranks safety below another priority, and whether the reason for the ranking sits in the same place as the ranking. A ranking in a chat reply gets read aloud by someone else, who supplies the framing. A ranking with its reasoning attached can be explained in a deposition.
Writing the decision down makes it easier to quote, and product leads have sound instincts about not creating exhibits. But the fragment gets quoted anyway. If safety loses a resourcing argument this quarter, the record should say what it lost to and who accepted that cost, in one document, because the alternative record is a message typed at speed to someone outside the company. [3]
What to watch
- Whether later exhibits in the same lawsuits include internal research, not only conversations about priorities.
- Whether Apptopia's 600,000 US daily actives for Muse hold up past the launch charts into a second and third month.
- Whether Muse gains teen-facing features, and how Meta documents the safety resourcing behind them.